I’m pretty glad that Thunderbolts* was actually a pretty good movie and not like others released around the same time. It was released on May 2, 2025 to theaters with a runtime of 127 minutes. On Rotten Tomatoes it has a 88% critic score and a 93% audience rating. Something I found interesting is that there was a pretty rabid marketing campaign for this film a bit after its release that was a pretty big spoiler for the end of the film.
The movie was directed by Jake Schreier and produced by Kevin Feige. The main cast includes Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko, Lewis Pullman, Geraldine Viswanathan, Chris Bauer, Wendell Pierce, David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The story was written by Eric Pearson and adapted into a screenplay by Joanna Calo and Eric Pearson. The story was based off of Marvel comics, obviously.
The main plot is about a group of contract killers trying to escape then later stop CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine from executing her plan to succeed in a project to create a superhuman nicknamed “Sentry”. The story primarily focuses on the character of Yelena Belova, who is tired of working in the shadows and wants to be seen as a hero to the people. Originally the group of mercenaries were hired to kill each other to cover up the superhuman experiments that caused many disappearances. The group teams up with Congressman Bucky Barnes but they are a little too late.
This movie does so much good, which helped restore a bit of my hope in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The acting is amazing and the visuals are extremely cool looking, especially towards the end. I also like how they brought back quite a few characters that fell more into obscurity. My only complaint is that I was left a little confused with some of the characters’ backstories as there is a lot of hopping around. The ending is also nice and the post-credit scene was left to set up something much bigger. Overall this move is a 3.9/5 to me, because it is nothing revolutionary but it still manages to be great when Marvel is in a bit of a rut.
